Looking for the next big thing

Are you looking for the next big thing worth investing time in? Plenty of people have ridden, or are still riding, the Ruby and Ruby on Rails wave. I’ve had reservations about both, but I can’t deny the innovations Ruby and Rails brought. Ruby’s syntax bothers me, and some of the stories about Rails gave me a bit of a fright. Hello, Zed Shaw. Either way, I can confidently say that for dyed-in-the-wool Java developers there’s an option that can hold its own against Ruby and Rails. I wouldn’t claim it’s better. Welcome, Groovy and Grails.

Groovy is a dynamic language, sometimes called a scripting language, built on the JVM. It shares some of Java’s syntax but adds plenty of syntactic sugar, such as map and array literals, type inference and closures. Like Java, Groovy has standard libraries. The GDK offers a basic API that mirrors the JDK in many ways, but its design shows less wear and tear. A big advantage is that Groovy source compiles directly to bytecode and looks like an ordinary Java application to the JVM. You can also use any Java API you like from Groovy.

If my description hasn’t piqued your interest, take a look at this excellent presentation. It will introduce you to Groovy from a Java developer’s perspective and beyond.

Grails is a web framework built on Spring, Hibernate, Ant and others. A Groovy façade wraps and tidies them all up, making development feel genuinely nimble. I’m no Rails expert, but Grails strikes me as aiming for much the same thing in a different shade, with proven technology underneath. As a bonus, InfoQ offers a free book, Getting Started with Grails.

I’ve found my next big thing. What about you?